


Relearning

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Cylon Occupied Caprica, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2018-03-11 07:05:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3318470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She had no reason in the universe to come back.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relearning

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to livejournal many moons ago. I'm simply archiving it here.

She'd said she would come back for him. He hadn't really believed her.  
  
He honestly didn’t think of that as lack of faith or as a slight on her character. She had no reason in the universe to come back. He wondered from time to time—as he crouched behind trees, too tired to run anymore, or stood breathless and watched something go up in flames—if the last time they frakked had been goodbye for her. It was for him.   
  
But it was often the second time they had sex that he thought about. It had been amazing, not merely in a physical way, although it was that. What made it so singular and strangely wonderful was that he somehow managed to literally forget the fatalism of the resistance and the brutality of the occupation, block it all out as if it didn't exist—because only they existed. He'd been entirely with her, surrounded by her. As he lay there in his bed afterwards, as she had gone down to check on Helo, neither of them sleeping because sleep was for the defeated, and he was sated but not sluggish, alive but not tense, he wondered at how such peace—the kind of peace that probably wouldn't seem like it to anyone else—could result from chaos; around them, inside them.  
  
The first time he'd really got to put his hands on her had been sloppy and hard but ultimately too serious to be fast. That had been the problem. For no reason he understood at the time, when he thrust hard and hot inside her, it nearly sent him headlong into a full-blown panic attack, the sensation—like falling, drowning—so real and so close he could have taken a breath too deep and felt it right there, coursing through him. It was only her firm grip on his body, her ragged fingernails digging into his hips, that kept him breathing and moving. He was mortally afraid he'd never last until he could make her come, but he did, somehow, and he can still remember the sounds she made, sounds he's not sure he's ever heard again. Perhaps he never wanted too. It was too much.  
  
As he lay there spent and broken afterward, the panic returned, along with fear from deep in his gut. And that was only the start of it. Days, weeks later, her tags tangled up in his fist, he realized it had been the forgetting that made him nearly come apart at the seams that night. He'd lulled himself into torpor until he met her—not that the resistance was calm and quiet, but for him it had devolved into an exercise in futility and apathy. He hadn't known it, but he was simply going through the motions of survival; he didn't think anymore about why and what for. And he only realized it because this woman fell out of the sky and stopped those motions cold for one brief instant, showed him the resignation that was really inside of him. And as she laughed her way down from her own orgasm, her limbs sinking heavy into his as she rolled over on top of him, he felt it all return: the anger and the stubbornness and the give a damn.   
  
Frakking Kara the first time meant relearning what he wanted. He sure as hell hadn't thought he could frak her again, not if it felt like he was being rearranged on the inside like that. He thanked the gods she took him again, and that the second time, even as he was prepared for the breaking, what he got was rather more like knitting himself back together. He forgot about the Cylons and the danger, the starvation and exhaustion; he just had her in his arms, knowing so little about her but feeling like he understood her anyway. Or at least he recognized the hungry look in her eyes, because it was a hunger he used to have and wanted again.  
  
She was always Starbuck then, but somehow Starbuck wasn't a pilot until she climbed into that raptor and flew away, leaving hope in her wake, but not the hope she thought.   
  
He didn't believe she would come back. He was sure he would die on Caprica, sooner rather than later. But he decided he would find a way to survive as long as he could, find reasons to; if nothing else, he could use his energy to buy others a few more days to live out their reasons, to remember what separated them from the toasters: hope and love and fire.  
  
Those things, though, were hard and painful. He hadn't known an impulsive frak could put him back on that exhilarating and frustrating road of really trying and caring about the consequences. It wasn't the first time he frakked someone during the occupation just to keep from losing his mind, and it wasn't the last, but she was the only one who mattered like that. She was a propelling force instead of just a shape to fill a lack or a way to drag out the endless days in oblivion rather than nightmare. He hadn't known he needed that, and he hadn't in the slightest been looking for it. But he got it; he got her.  
  
He should have known she was capable of coming back for him even if it seemed impossible. After all, he'd only met her because she'd flown right into the worst of it, put herself down on Caprica again for a wild dream of Roslin's when the cost should have been too high for anybody but a crazy person to risk. He knew it, though, when he was rescued by the most frakked-up angel he'd ever conceived of, blonde and grinning and almost suicidally brave. He also knew it when she greeted him with an embrace almost hard enough to break them both: the tags had definitely been goodbye.  
  
He never asked her what drove her back to him, if it was anything as unexpected as a pair of hands sliding along her back, clutching her tighter than a person could bear, reminding her she was alive. He never asked because after the feeling of safety began to set hard into his bones there on the Galactica, he realized two things: he didn't know how to want more than to just survive, and he would never figure it out without her. 


End file.
